There is no time; there is. 

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And she was given the real names of things' means she really perceived, she saw the real.  That's it.  If everything is living, it's not a name but moving.  And without this living there is nothing; this living is the only matter matters.  The thing itself.  This isn't an expression of a real thing: this is the thing itself. 

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Acker witnessed the grittiness of New York City in the eighties, and like other writers of the time took advantage of the ability to write about it.   With the added twist of exploring it through Charles Dicken’s classic of the same name which paints the grittiness of London of the nineteenth century.  Two different cities, two different eras, but two very similar experiences of the desire for transcendence, a desire to reach beyond their current planes.  Acker writes with a postmodern twist with an almost post-feminist allegiance, portraying patriarchal structures in a way which at first reading endorses them but to fully subvert them.   Pip (named Peter in Acker’s novel) is the vehicle for literary experimentation to its fullest – so much so, that some have accused Acker of plagiarism, but is it an accusation when it is completely deliberate?  Acker with her postmodernist-punk attitude aimed to transgress literary convention, challenging focalisation (reminding the reader the main narrator is fiction and not the writer) whilst also breaking the bounds of literary style, flowing in and out of prose, poem, and script.  She skillfully challenges the formulaic character studies - literary novels can tend to be by playing with time, sexes, and identities.  Thus, pages are filled with fragments of shock, familiarity, and unfamiliarity. The reader becomes an audience to reels of different times, places and events, a retracing of the character’s history, whilst simultaneously a retracing of literary history. 

 

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‘I was bent upon getting over a perspective of barriers, with my hands and feet bound.  Pretty much what we are all about, waking, I think?  If life was an obstacle course, his progress was not being helped by family ties that were starting to feel more like fetters; children who seemed reluctant to ‘do anything for themselves’…

 

But still, Dickens felt trapped by the past, and it was becoming increasingly clear that these were not the sort of ghosts that could be laid to rest by the ritual sacrifice of a few letters.  In one of his stories ‘The Haunted House’, he wrote of ‘the ghosts of my own childhood, the ghost of my own innocence, the ghost of my own airy belief’.  These were the ghosts that had always haunted his fiction….

(From the introduction of Great Expectations by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst)

 

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Acker, like Dickens, had the same aims of getting over a ‘perspective of barriers’ as a writer and being rid of her ghosts through fiction.  Writing during a heavily male postmodern scene, she transgresses the conventions of the writer, becoming a literary anarchist with her method of copy and pasting and unafraid to be playful with meaning and morals in this novel.  And like Dickens who felt trapped by the past, Acker challenges literary tradition by utilising one of the most canonical texts in literature to run riot with.

 

Both writers in their own way illustrate the experience of creation and recreation of identity and desire to push through cultural, social, sexual, and temporal bounds through the challenge of traditions and social norms of the time or non-times in which they are set.  

 

This read gave me a little shake from the status quo of literary conventions and my expectations of characters and plot.  I so often read to dissect and analyse and create meaning from what I read (don't we all, sometimes) but Acker forces the reader just to read and maybe reread, pushing even the limitations of the reading experience.  Her style of writing invites the enjoyability of reading, not promoting some great big message, whilst still of course in its postmodern way creating food for thought.  I think that’s why this novel was so stimulating, without being too obnoxious, Acker writes with assuredness and a sense of anarchy which makes you question the normal and expected.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rating 8/10.

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